Dishes to refine:
Shellfish bisques; patés and Wellingtons; dacquoises and other meringue-based desserts.
Dishes that she feels aren’t worth the effort, or dishes that have failed, woefully:
Layer cakes, candies, aspics, and ice cream desserts: baba au rhum, feuilletés, galantines.
Dishes she would very much like to try, if she ever travels widely:
Fresh scallops and snails, real curry, Italian dumplings, all manner of cheeses, mangos, Chinese things.
Signed by Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey and Martha Maria Wooster Bliss, May 26, 1895
chapter 11
The Green Book’s Guide to Life
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Dulcy hadn’t forgotten to eat since she was ten, the age when she’d begun trying to replicate the dishes she tasted during visits to New York. As her loopy childish penmanship gradually became tight and cryptic, she filled Walton’s discarded green notebook with recipes, mangled terms for French techniques, and souvenir menus. She didn’t weigh more than one hundred pounds until she was fourteen, but by then she’d worked through most of Miss Corson’s Practical American Cookery and Maria Parloa, and Martha helped her struggle through the cromesquis, cannelons, bressoles, and brissotins in Ranhoffer. On her sixteenth birthday, when she received The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, she copied down a quote from Ruskin:
What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all fruits, and herbs, and balms, and spices—and of all that is healing, and sweet in fields, and groves, and savory in meats—it means carefulness, and inventiveness, and watchfulness, and willingness, and readiness of appliance. It means the economy of your great-grandmothers, and the science of modern chemists—it means much tasting, and no wasting—it means English thoroughness, and French art, and Arabian hospitality.
She had been very serious: she had been sure her life would include a huge garden and house, a half-dozen children, a trip to Europe every spring. Before that time, she would travel, and go to Vassar or Barnard, and have lovers and adventures. She’d have them after, too.
Victor Maslingen, having sustained heavy losses in the African minerals market (he would be the only person to have lost money in that country, in the boom year since the end of the war) has returned from a brief funeral-going vacation in the Empire State, and now talks of selling the Butler Hotel instead of the Intelligencer. Our misfortune, and yours.
— The Seattle General, February 11, 1905
Dulcy stopped holding her breath whenever a train came through town, and she took the local to Bozeman on February 14, where she sent a telegram to Spokane. She made the trip again two days later and claimed Walton’s pine trunk, which had been held in Spokane under the name of Amelie Poliwood; the Spokane porter had done his job. Now she had the trunk carted to a side room in the freezing Bozeman freight depot, and she transferred Walton’s medicine box and the journals and the clothes she’d used to cushion them into a new valise, including two thin cotton dresses she’d inherited from Martha’s trousseau that she’d packed in case she ended up taking Walton to a California or Arizona clinic. She left his clothes and coats and boots and mining talismans, his folder of published articles and reading glasses and shaving set, and tried to pack them as she had in Seattle, while Victor watched. The journals were a risk, but the Boys would probably assume they’d been left in Seattle; the Boys might never look inside. The trunk smelled of Walton in a good way, but he was miles away, years away, down to sounds and fragments. In the middle of the night he was a long novel, but in the light of the here and now he’d lost his edge, done the thing the dead do and begun to fade from feeling to thought. All the brutal, shitty, gravelly reality smoothed and silky, like the new notebook fabrics.
She ripped off the forwarding name so that the original label was visible—Remfrey , 109 East 19th St., Manhattan —and when the porter reappeared, she tapped the address and tipped him a dollar. She checked the valise into a locker at the station and waited at the library until after the shift change, when she reclaimed the valise and rode back to Livingston. When she climbed off she thought of how pretty the town was when the light was clear, of how she wanted to stay and not board another train for a long time.
At the Elite (which he called the Eee-light), Irving lugged the valise up the stairs, while Dulcy dodged looks from Eugenia and Irina. Alone in her room, she lifted out the medicine box and removed the dozen journals, one by one. Garnet theories, egg yolk cures, red carnage, rose pink love. She opened the peach My Family and Life for the photographs: a formal portrait of young Walton with Woolcock and Christopher in Chile; Walton’s dead first wife, Jane, deeply religious but with a sensual, Spanish face; Philomela, primped and young and too ethereal for anyone’s good. Walton had saved snapshots of his children by the 19th Street stoop; Martha in the kitchen with Dulcy on a stool, stirring a pot (apple butter, Dulcy thought); the girls and a spaniel named Harry wading in Lake Erie. The travel photos were a mix of shattered masonry, pretty nurses, and Dulcy posing before a variety of backdrops: on-deck lifeboats, a tumbled pyramid, a seawall, a coolie, mountains, the sea, a trained bear, trains. She did not always look clean or well fed, but she had been happy.
In the green book, Walton, who’d written Walton Joseph Remfrey, Transvaal on every other new flyleaf, had done her the gift of entering just Dulcy’s Book here—no date, no family name or location. It began with the pages Walton had filled before Dulcy had taken it over: a skirmish with horticulture when he’d first visited Westfield, notes on the possibility of growing coffee or tea in northern Oregon or opium poppies in Montana, where the climate was similar to Afghanistan.